Towards a Better Methodology for Understanding Religion, Culture and Chinese Modernity

Towards a Better Methodology for Understanding Religion,
Culture and Chinese Modernity
Richard Madsen‹University of California, San Diego›

Summary
There is a lack of fit between Western categories (derived from the European experience ofmodernization and secularization) for studying religion, on the one hand, and Chinese realities on theother. Since the academic study of China is dominated by these European categories, it is difficult togain an accurate understanding of Chinese cultural history. This is not simply a problem for Westernintellectuals. Insofar as Chinese intellectuals and government have adopted Western categories forstudying religion, they have difficulty understanding their own society, sometimes with tragic
consequences. By expanding their horizons to engage in a deeper encounter with Chinese history—by
truly learning from Chinese history, not just employing Western-derived preconceptions to learn about it—scholars (in both the West and Asia) can develop new, more subtle ways of understanding theinterplay of sacred and secular in the modern world.
Key Words: Religion, Secularization, Western categories

In the late 16th century, Matteo Ricci and his Jesuit colleagues claimed that China had no religion. AsRicci saw it, the Chinese were guided by a very rich and profound moral philosophy derived from theteachings of Confucius, and this philosophy was completely compatible with the best moral philosophy in
Christian Europe. But the Chinese did not worship any supernatural deities who would be incompatible
with worship of the one true Christian God. They could thus accept Christianity without having to modify
any aspect of their moral life.1
But what was one to make of the elaborate rituals that Chinese emperors carried out to worship
Heaven and to ensure that the world maintained its proper place within the cosmic order? Or thecomplicated funeral rituals that people at all levels of Chinese society carried out to send their deceased
family members to another world and to maintain contact with them? Or the temples that dominated every
major community? The Jesuits said that the rituals of the imperial cult were only expressions of moral
aspiration, they were not really religious. Likewise, the life cycle rituals of family life were simply anexpression of an admirable filial piety. The temple worship of the common people, on the other hand, was“superstition” mixin—a term introduced into Chinese by the Jesuits. Such superstition was the product ofignorance, just as it was when it appeared among the common people in Europe, and it would steadily beeliminated through the teaching and guidance of China’s enlightened leadership.2
The Jesuit claims were, of course, challenged by rival missionaries, who argued that Chinese rites
were indeed practices of an idolatrous religion. The resultant “rites controversy” ended in the early 18th
century with a papal edict against the Jesuit position. In response the Yongzheng emperor in 1724 declared
Christianity to be a heterodox religion.
At the root of this problem was a lack of fit between European categories for understanding religion,on the one hand, and Chinese realities, on the other. Because of this mismatch, there was no clear way forWestern missionaries to determine whether or not Chinese rituals were religious or not. Since the resulting
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controversy within the Catholic Church could not be resolved through reason, it could only be resolved
through papal authority. The incommensurability of China thus led to bitter political infighting within theChurch, not to fruitful theological debate.
Similar problems persist to this day, and are highlighted in the problems that scholars face when they
try to comprehend Chinese ritual life through the categories based on Western religious experience. One
difference between our predicament and that of European Catholic missionaries and theologians at the timeof the rites controversy is that analytic categories rooted in Western religious experience have now beentransmitted to China and dominate the discourse of Chinese intellectuals as well. So not only do Westernscholars have a difficult time understanding Chinese ritual life, but Chinese scholars have a difficult time
as well.
For Western scholars of religion, religion is usually defined in terms of beliefs in supernaturalrealities. Rituals are symbolic ways of expressing these beliefs. The beliefs and rituals are preserved,
developed, and enacted through religious institutions. Modern scholars of religion have a somewhat
different understanding of the relation between religious institutions and society than did the Jesuits andtheir rivals in the 16th century. We usually place our analysis of religion against the backdrop ofsecularization. In present usage the categories of religion and secularization grow out of a narrative of themodernization of Western societies over the past four centuries.
The narrative goes something like this: In the middle ages, European culture was dominated andunified by a common Christian faith and by a Catholic Church that was in practice tightly intertwined with—although in theory potentially separate from—European politics and economics. The unity of theCatholic faith was shattered by the Protestant reformation. The resulting intra-European warfare wasbrought to an end by political arrangements that “secularized” politics, that is, separated religion frompolitics, legitimated public life on the basis of reason rather faith and relegated religion to the sphere ofprivate life. Modern European nation states are based on common cultures, which are connected to acommon European culture that at one time was based on Christianity and to some degree, for better orworse, still bears the marks of its Christian origins. But contemporary political life is based on secularrationality, although there are “fundamentalist” political forces that would like to once again impose
Christian principles on public life.3
This way of thinking about religion defines it in terms of individual, subjective belief, it makes clear
distinctions between religion, on the one hand, and science, economics, and politics on the other, and it
sees as problematic the attempt by people of faith to impose their private faith on public life. Scholars like
Jose Casanova and Talal Asad have recently that this account of religion in Western cultural history is, inimportant respects, misleading.4 However, for many generations of scholars, these categories have worked
reasonably well in making sense out of Western cultural history, and in my view this demonstrates a roughcorrespondence between these categories and Western historical realities.
There is not even a rough correspondence, however, with Chinese cultural history. If we apply thesecategories, drawn from European historical experience, onto the history of modern China, we get a mass ofconfusion and a host of anomalies. First of all, imperial China was full of “teachings” ( jiao) and “rituals”( ji), but these do not correspond to what Westerners have come to call “religion.” As Kristofer Schipper
has put it, “The very notion of religion as we define it in the West is an obstacle (to understanding Chinesesociety), and a great number of observers have fallen into the trap of failing to see that in a society sodissimilar from ours the religious system must also be very different.”5 For one thing, the various Chineseteachings (whether derived from Confucian, Daoist, or Buddhist texts) were not simply a matter ofsubjective belief. They consisted of stories, discourses, and practices that formed a comprehensiveframework for understanding the nature of social relations and the proper ways of living a good life. They
did not concern “supernatural” matters, supposedly separate from material life. They sometimes explainedparts of ordinary life visible to the senses by reference to forces invisible to ordinary observation, but thisis not different in principle (though it is different in substance) from how modern science explains40

Towards a Better Methodology for Understanding Religion, Culture and Chinese Modernity

empirical phenomena. For example, teachings in the Daoist tradition held that everything was made up ofqi, including dead people, including those shen that in Western translation are called “gods.” The jiao that
we translate as “teachings” led to “knowledge” which lumped together and did not differentiate between
what we would call scientific, moral, and religious knowledge.
The teachings were intertwined with a rich and varied array of rituals, the meaning of which was onlypartly explained by the teachings. But the rituals were not segregated into specifically religious institutions.
The great state rituals were an integral part of imperial politics. Community festivals, centered on local
temples, combined commerce and local politics with enactment of legends and imprecations of the shen—so much so that it is almost impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. Family rituals, likefunerals, were expressions of status, wealth, and power as well as expressions of belief in a world beyond
the present. And the rebellious activities of “heterodox” sects were motivated as much by economic andsocial discontent as by heterodox teachings (xiejiao).
Not only did the realities of “traditional” Chinese teachings fail to fit into Western categories forthinking about religion, but the history of China’s passage to modernity fails to match the Western narrativeof secularization. At the beginning of the 20th century, for example, Chinese modernizing reformers did
not seek to banish religion to the private sphere but actually “discovered” within their tradition new
religious bases for public life. Thus, in 1906 the emperor elevated worship of Confucius to the level of aGrand Sacrifice at the imperial court. (Before this, Confucius sacrifice was only a “Middle Sacrifice.” The
Grand Sacrifices were reserved to worship of Heaven and Earth and the imperial ancestors.) Around thesame time, rituals for worshiping Confucius were made a part of newly reformed government schools. (TheChinese modernizers were influenced by Japanese modernizers’ use of State Shinto to create a basis fornational unity under a divine Emperor. But the Chinese approach actually diminished the prestige of theemperor and sought the basis for national unity in a Confucian ethos that transcended the agency of theemperor.) Immediately after the 1911 revolution, Chinese leaders began to create new nation wide Daoist,Buddhist, Confucian, and Muslim associations organized along the model of Christian denominations in
the West.6
The May Fourth movement represented deep criticisms of traditional teachings and both theGuomindang and the Communist party followed the Soviet Union in seeking modernization by suppressing
religion. But even while engaged in what would seem to be a project of secularization, these politicalmovements created great public rituals. The Guomintang had the great memorial to Sun Yat-sen in Nanjing,
as well as the New Life Movement of the 1930s aimed at moral regeneration of Chinese citizens. And ofcourse the Maoist regime eventually created its own rituals of worship for a quasi-deified Mao Zedong.
Were these rituals “religious”? Strictly speaking, probably not, in terms of Western definitions of religion.
But one might argue that they were at least as religious as the grand rituals of the Imperial courts.
At the same time, both the Guomindang and the Communists carried out campaigns against“superstitions” which were defined in terms of local rituals and teachings that resisted organization into
nationwide “church-like” associations that could be easily controlled by the state. If in the West,secularization entailed a separation of religion from the public sphere and its relegation to the private
sphere, in the modernization of China the process went in an opposite direction. There was an attempt tosuppress “superstitious” practices that in Western terms might be considered relatively private and to put
into their place new public, state-directed rituals. Western categories for analyzing the relationship between
religion, secularization, and cultural modernization are incapable for making sense of these Chinesedevelopments.
This is not simply a problem for Western intellectuals. Insofar as Chinese intellectuals and government
leaders have adopted Western categories for understanding religion, they have difficulty understanding
what is going on in their own society, sometimes with tragic consequences. During the Maoist era, themain categories for defining religion and understanding its place in modernization came from Marxism,which shared the assumptions of other forms of Western enlightenment thinking that religion was41

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connected with feudal society and would be eliminated in the course of secular modernity. This way of
thinking left Chinese leaders poorly prepared to anticipate and to evaluate the persistence of popular
traditions despite government attempts to suppress them and the reconstitution and efflorescence of these
traditions during the Reform era.
During the Reform era, the problem has been further complicated by the adoption of categories from
Western European social science. For example, the practice of qigong was encouraged during the Maoist
era because it was seen as a kind of science based on the traditional wisdom of the masses and it waspromoted and developed, along with traditional Chinese medicine as part of the policy of “walking on twolegs.” It continued to be promoted as such in the 1980s and early 1990s. But then certain aspects of qigong
came to be seen as incompatible with modern science and therefore religious or superstitious. When theFalungong and some similar qigong movements began to engage in activities that appeared to thegovernment to threaten social stability, these movements were defined as “heterodox teaching” (xiejiao).
This term was commonly used during the imperial era but had not been widely used during the 20thcentury. (Groups that during the imperial era had been called xiejiao tended to be called hui dao men by theGuomindang and the CCP. In the 1950s, PRC scholars developed a narrative whereby these hui dao men
represented true peasant revolutionary forces during the feudal imperial period but became reactionary
under the Guomindang during the Republican period.) But now by the year 2000 xiejiao became defined interms of the Western sociology of “cults.” Although “cult” is now given a universal definition, so as toencompass groups like the Branch Dravidians in the United States and Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, thesociological term “cult” bears the marks of the Christian background of the Western sociologists who firstused the term. The term “cult” in Western sociology usually refers to religious groups that are far removed
from the mother religion of a given society—eg., in the United States, cults are those new religious groups
that do not base their teachings on the Hebrew or Christian bible. But in China, qigong groups—evenextreme ones like Falungong—are drawn from some powerful currents of Chinese tradition. So the term
“cult” does not seem to capture the realities of practices like Falungong, and this lack of fit makes it
difficult for Westerners concerned about religious freedom to fully accept Chinese government claims thatFalungong needed to be suppressed.7
To understand the role of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist teachings and rituals in Chinese history
and to evaluate their continuing development in recent years we need better categories than those of theWestern sociology of religion. Western scholars of China need to become critically aware of how theircategories of thought are grounded in their own narratives of how Christian Europe became divided andeventually secularized (and how a once privatized Christianity is now in some places struggling to reoccupy the public sphere). By expanding their horizons to engage in a deeper encounter with Chinese
history—by truly learning from Chinese history, not just employing Western-derived preconceptions tolearn about it—scholars (in both the West and Asia) can develop new, more subtle ways of understanding
the interplay of sacred and secular in the modern world.
Notes
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See: George Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy: From its Beginnings to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola
University Press, 1985); D. E. Mungello, ed., The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning (SanktAugustin, Germany: Monumenta Serica, 1994); and Donald F. St. Sure, S. J. trans., 100 Roman Documents concerning
the Roman Rites Controversy (1645–1941) (San Francisco: Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco, 1992).
Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 16–17.
For a summary and critique of this view, see Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 11–39.
Casanova, op. cit. and Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity andIslam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 27–54.
Schipper, op. cit., p. 2.
Chen His-yuan, “At the Threshhold of the Parthenon of Religions: Confucianism and the World Parliament of42

Towards a Better Methodology for Understanding Religion, Culture and Chinese Modernity

7Religions”; Kuo Ya-pei, “Recasting Confucianism: From Religion to National Symbol, 1902–1911”; and Vincent
Goossaert, “The Modern Secular Chinese State Likes Church-Like Religions: Early Republican National Religious
Associations.” Papers presented at International Conference on Religion, Modernity, and the State in China andTaiwan, at University of California, Santa Barbara, October 28–30, 2005.
David Palmer, “Labelling Heterodox Religion in Socialist China: From Huidaomen to Xiejiao”. Paper presented atInternational Conference on Religion, Modernity, and the State in China and Taiwan, at University of California, SantaBarbara, October 28–30, 2005.

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